In November 2020, by a margin of nearly two to one — 66 percent to 34 percent — Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment creating a bipartisan redistricting commission to draw the state’s legislative maps. The measure carried every county and independent city in the Commonwealth except one. It was a resounding expression of the public will: Virginians wanted politicians out of the mapmaking business.
The result? Virginia has arguably the fairest maps in the entire country.
On April 21, 2026, that reform was undone. A new referendum, jammed through with just 51.5% of the vote, handed the power to draw congressional districts back to the Democrat-controlled General Assembly. A reform that took years of bipartisan coalition-building to enact was reversed in a single special election by a razor-thin margin. What Democrats did to get here was not merely aggressive. It was egregious — a systematic dismantling of Virginia’s constitutional safeguards that exist precisely to prevent this kind of thing.
Start with the money. Total spending on the referendum exceeded $90 million — the most expensive ballot measure in Virginia history. The “yes” side spent roughly $65 to $70 million, much of it through dark-money nonprofits like House Majority Forward. The “no” side raised approximately $23 million — a ratio of roughly 3-to-1. But even that understates the imbalance. The “no” side’s money arrived late. For weeks, Virginia voters were saturated almost exclusively with “yes” messaging. By the time opposing voices reached comparable volume, hundreds of thousands of early votes had been cast. In the critical early phase, the spending disparity was more like 10-to-1.
But the money is only half the story. The deeper scandal is how Democrats manipulated the constitutional amendment process itself — and here, the details matter.
Virginia’s Constitution does not allow the General Assembly to amend the state’s Constitution on a whim. Article XII, Section 1, prescribes a deliberately slow, two-step process. First, both chambers must pass a proposed amendment. Then a new election of the House of Delegates must occur. And only after that intervening election, and a second passage by the new legislature, may the amendment go to voters — and even then, not sooner than ninety days after final passage. These requirements exist to prevent a single legislative majority from bulldozing a constitutional change through before the public can react.
Democrats violated every one of these constitutional safeguards.
The first passage of the proposed amendment occurred during a resurrected special session called in May 2024 to address a budget dispute. Democrats argue that session was never formally adjourned, and thus they could use it to pass a redistricting amendment that had nothing to do with the budget. Under Virginia law, special sessions are governed by the scope of their call. The governing resolution, HJR 6001, was limited to budget matters. Expanding it to include a constitutional amendment would have required a two-thirds vote — a vote that never occurred. A Tazewell County judge found this violated Article IV, Section 6, and Article V, Section 5 of Virginia’s Constitution, and declared it “void, ab initio” — void from the beginning.
The intervening-election requirement was equally flouted. Because the first passage was engineered on October 31, 2025 – six weeks after voting had begun in Virginia’s 2025 election, rather than before a general election of House of Delegates members, there was no true intervening election between the first and second passages. The voters never had the chance that Article XII guarantees them: to pass judgment on the legislators who would cast the second, decisive vote. Democrats simply skipped that step.
Then there is the 90-day rule. Article XII, Section 1, states plainly that a proposed amendment may not be submitted to voters “sooner than ninety days after final passage by the General Assembly.” This is not ambiguous. It is a bright-line requirement written into the Constitution. On April 22, a Tazewell County Circuit Court judge ruled that this requirement was not met — that the timeline from second passage on January 19, 2026, to the commencement of early voting on March 6, 2026, fell far short of 90 days.
Finally, entirely apart from the procedural violations, the maps themselves are under challenge. Article II, Section 6, of the Virginia Constitution requires that “every electoral district shall be composed of contiguous and compact territory.” A hearing on the proposed maps’ compliance with this requirement was held Monday in Richmond Circuit Court, where a ruling is pending.
All four challenges now converge on the Supreme Court of Virginia, which will render the final judgment. This is not a federal question — the challenges are rooted entirely in the Virginia Constitution, and federal courts have no jurisdiction over how a state interprets its own Constitution.
The courts will determine whether what happened was illegal. But there is no serious question about whether it was wrong. Democrats resurrected a dead special session, bypassed the intervening-election requirement, ignored the 90-day waiting period, and flooded a low-turnout special election with tens of millions in dark money — all to undo a bipartisan reform that Virginians approved by 2-to-1 just six years ago. The Virginia Constitution was written to prevent exactly this. Whether its protections will hold is now in the hands of seven justices in Richmond.
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Ken Cuccinelli is the former Virginia attorney general and former acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
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